key: cord-0067414-ravjintl
authors: Argent, David
title: The Pandemic’s Effect on Fisheries – An Academic’s Perspective
date: 2021-07-19
journal: Fisheries (Bethesda)
DOI: 10.1002/fsh.10644
sha: e03e7b305c7054946a987a46b3f3b3270c23cac5
doc_id: 67414
cord_uid: ravjintl

nan

Around mid-March 2020, it was revealed to the United States populous that COVID-19 was here (AJMC 2021). Since that time, we have seen an exponential increase in positive cases (CDC 2021) , hospitals swollen with infected patients, overworked and often understaffed healthcare providers (Lumpkin 2020) , restaurant closures/openings/closures, and millions of people out of work. And although certain restrictions have been placed on outdoor gatherings like capacity limits, social distancing, and mask wearing, we have seen a real boom in outdoor recreation with increased fishing and hunting license sales (Hollan 2020) , increased visitations to parks (Chrobak 2020) , and an unprecedented volume of boats sold (Woodyard 2020) . While social distancing was encouraged with these events, it appears to have given people some freedom that was otherwise taken away during the pandemic. With all this I began to ask myself, what impact the pandemic has had on our profession? Particularly in training students to enter the workforce.

To place this article in context, I am a college professor, so the pandemic has affected me to some extent, yet I am extremely grateful that I am still gainfully employed, have remained healthy, and have been able to accommodate my students as best as possible. Some universities and colleges opted to remain open and employ an aggressive testing strategy that allowed for limited in-person instruction on campus (Moody 2020 ); yet this strategy led to increasing positivity rates across many campuses (New York Times 2021). However, for others, it forced an immediate change from faceto-face learning to remote and online formats. In fact, many of us had less than a week to change our teaching strategies back in March 2020 from one delivery mode to another. And because many universities opted for remote learning, which is largely synchronous (a format that meets remotely at the regularly scheduled class time), demands were placed on us all, students and faculty alike, to quickly learn new technologies. Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and other platforms have been used to deliver content-all seemingly unheard-of within academic circles a year or so ago. After several remotely taught workshops and the addition of instructional software (e.g., D2L [Desire to Learn], a web-based data management system that allows faculty to store/share lecture/lab/ video content, manage courses and course assignments, and evaluate student progress) faculty had the tools necessary to proceed in virtual space and students had the tools required to garner lecture information. Yet, one can't help but wonder, "What kind of college experience is this?" And more importantly for the student, "Is this what I signed up for?"

Classrooms quickly became someone's bedroom or the kitchen table, our offices became our basements or the living room couch. Of course, these environments brought many challenges, including dogs barking, passing garbage trucks, tree trimmers, Internet failures, and kids/spouses walking behind us-seemingly to bomb our classrooms. This forced innovation in teaching from the integration of videos to lectures to kitchen-style experiments, where faculty either describe what is needed to perform an experiment or they mail materials to the students in a kit. Regrettably, the hands-on element that fisheries science is known for has been shelved to some degree with remote learning. Students may have to watch a video of electrofishing rather than performing the activity or read about doing a survey rather than actually participating in the task. For me, I was conducting an ichthyology lab in a pavilion to four masked students at a time, each at a separate pavilion-not ideal for sure, but the alternative was a PowerPoint slide show with narration and no real interaction. I would transport jars, sorting pans, ID-books, and a laptop to set up a remote lab. Each student had the chance to gain perspective of the shape and size of each fish and perhaps more importantly, the chance to interact with each other and myself. Thankfully, I never broke a glass jar transporting specimens from our museum in the back of my truck to the venue.

Research has also been challenging because of various hiring freezes of students and the lack of access to university vehicles, boats, and field sites, not to mention locally imposed restrictions on capacity limits and mask wearing. In addition, lab work has come to a screeching halt or been significantly modified given restrictive social distancing guidelines set forth not only by the state, but also by many universities. In short, I am spinning my wheels for now-struggling to make future plans. The incentive to write grants is also waning because I simply can't get the manpower needed to conduct fieldwork, so it has become increasingly difficult to create opportunities for students when the system cannot support the necessary parts to make it all work, like an automaton, but with missing pieces.

Since the pandemic ramped up, other areas of our academic profession has been affected. We have experienced earlier retirements (Chronicle of Higher Education 2020) and hiring freezes (Olena 2020; Schleunes 2020). Retirement for many may have been on the horizon 2 or 3 years from now, but the pandemic has changed how we think and, more importantly, what we deem important. Is it important to add that little bit more money for retirement or is it more important to spend that extra bit of time with family? This has forced many to re-prioritize their immediate futures in academia and forced others to change careers entirely (Nietzel 2021) .

With respect to recent graduates seeking entry-level positions, they are confronted with a very different set of circumstances. Positions within the field (especially among state governments) are difficult to find right now (Rosewicz and Maciag 2020) with many state agencies on a lockdown of sorts and fallback positions in the service industry even more difficult to find, given state's closures and social distancing requirements. Perhaps most disconcerting is the fact that many state/ federal/private agencies/organizations are not accepting interns at all. The steady stream of labor that our profession has come to enjoy and to thrive on has become greatly strained in the wake of the pandemic. But with the arrival of vaccines, this is slowly changing and will likely improve as 2021 wears on.

Even this organization, the American Fisheries Society, has been hit with the restructuring of the 150th Anniversary Meeting and, as of this writing, many other meetings across Divisions at least through late 2021 have been modified to remote formats. In addition, the AFS has required committee members to use web-based conferencing technologies rather than traditional meetings to conduct its business. However, through adversity comes innovation, which has certainly reigned supreme during this trying time. Innovation in how we work, how we communicate, how we teach/learn, and how we socialize. In short, this pandemic has pressed us all to think outside of the box, which may not be a bad thing. Moving forward, I believe that we will likely see more blended or hybrid models for teaching that combine both a face-to-face experience with an online experience, either within a course or across a curriculum.

There are a few positive notes that have surfaced during this period and several others that appear promising on the horizon. First, an uptick in license sales. This is great for state agencies that have been experiencing declines in fishing participation over the years, which translates into a reduction of funding (e.g., Pennsylvania; Huba 2019). This boom surely will help to bridge gaps that have surfaced and provide needed revenue. Secondly, boat sales are up (Woodyard 2020) . I can recall walking into my local sporting goods store in 2020 seeing the remnants of the kayak section with nary a paddle to spare. Thirdly, visitation to parks and other outdoor venues has increased. People are opting to not stay at home and watch a movie or play video games, but rather to get outside. These behaviors I hope will not be forgotten once we are through these dark days.

For the future, the vaccine rollout has happened rapidly, and, in many ways, life is beginning to return to a sense of pre-pandemic normalcy. I hope that once this is over, people reflect on the past year and think about the sacrifices as well as the compromises they made. Moving forward, our profession will survive this and will once again return to "normal," or at least a new normal. Most importantly, I firmly believe that many who found a new hobby (e.g., fishing or boating) during the pandemic will continue with it, thereby increasing the need for well-trained fisheries biologists. Therefore, we must stay the course and be patient as a nation waits for that shot in the arm.

American Journal of Managed Care) staff. 2021. A timeline of COVID-19 developments in 2020

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